Video games, pen&paper RPGs and other nerdery

RPG-Blog-O-Quest #10

For this month’s RPG-Blog-O-Quest, Greifenklaue picked the subject ‘Fantasy’ as opposed to Science Fiction last month. As usual, the first segment will be in my native language German, the second part will have a translation. Game on!

English version

Do you prefer low or high fantasy? Why? – I consider myself a fan of high fantasy. The first fantasy books I read at a young age were Neverending Story and Lord of the Rings, which is the poster child for high fantasy. Yet, I would say that the fantasy style I like most is epic. It doesn’t matter if this is high fantasy style with lots of magic and dragons, or the gritty, grimdark stories like A Song of Ice and Fire (aka GoT). It just needs to be an excellent, epic story.

My favorite crossover with fantasy is Numenera. Just two weeks ago I waxed poetic about this, how creative this game makes me. Numenera can be a game with many fantasy elements. Kingdoms, castles, missing princesses. Of course the castles can grow continually with self-creating rooms, or the missing princess might be stuck in a crashed spaceship. The possibilities for crossover are limitless.

In Oldschool gaming I particular like nothing at all, really. I am not a fan of the oldschool revival movement. When I think oldschool gaming, I am thinking it’s about endless dungeon crawls, high lethality and TPKs, drawing maps on notepads and micromanagement. I am a huge fan of Creighton Broadhurst, head of Raging Swan, who create some of the best GM aides for Pathfinder (with system-neutral publications now as well). I however cannot understand his infatuation with old first edition rules. There’s a reason games evolve. I think DnD 5e has made big steps on finding a new audience, with the rise of Actual Play Podcasts and streams. I prefer newer systems.

In the previous month, the RPG blog carnival had the subject ‘dragons’. What’s your favorite RPG-story regarding dragons? – None, unfortunately. I never GM’d for a high level party to meet dragons or had a high level character myself. This is why I am hoping my Rise of the Runelords campaign will make it to book 4, to return to Sandpoint…Oh yeah.

What’s your favorite fantasy race? Why? – I don’t actually have any favorite race. I know people out there who play elves in just about any game (like Pike, e.g. ;)) but I have no preference. I kinda dig halflings, because I’m a chubby lady who likes food and being comfortable. Which is not particularly heroic, but fun.